for your collection

About this site

Stephen Herbert trained as a technician in visual media, working in education and film. He is currently a media historian and researcher, and museum consultant.

For twenty years my partner Mo Heard and I have been selling books, fourteen years online. We are now phasing out our small publishing/distribution partnership The Projection Box. Mo is spending time with her collection of publications about popular art, and I’ve started this web site – selling items that I’ve had for years and no longer need, and things I’ve come across recently and find interesting.

Not all rare books are expensive. Many inexpensive rare books are interesting. It’s mostly the less expensive, but very interesting books and ephemera that I’m offering here. And not just books and ephemera, but also odd and unusual objects of all kinds – with a leaning towards my interests in visual media.

As a school-leaver in the ’60s I was, for a few engaging months, taught paper conservation at the Public Record Office, then in Central London. In the 1980s I taught myself bookbinding, eventually enrolling on a course at the London School of Printing, being taught by one of the British Library’s top bookbinders. My skills and resources are somewhat limited, but where I feel that I can usefully repair items that come my way, I do so, using professional materials including acid-free papers and appropriate archival adhesives. My most fervent wish is that I could go back in time, find the person who invented Sellotape, and persuade them – by whatever means – not to do so.

My aim is to provoke from anyone browsing the site, the comment “I’ve never seen one of those before …..”